Re-imagining Communities and Powering an Inclusive Future

This year, I teamed up with Cisco to attend the recent Barcelona Smart City Expo World Congress, which took place in the midst of worldwide disruptions, and shutdowns caused by COVID. Those disruptions aggravated two other significant vectors of change—climate induced disasters affecting cities throughout the world, and an increasing unease and demand to address the strikingly sharp divides in terms of wealth driven by race or geography.

Combined, these factors have created an intense urgency around internet connectivity affecting almost every crucial service including education, health and emergency services. More positively, ?that velocity of technological advances is accelerating at even a greater rate which provides hope so long as ?government can harness those advances to address these most serious issues. Too often at conferences the conversation merely focuses on new technology and the prodigious data it produces.

Fortunately, ?Cisco’s keynote session at Barcelona did not spotlight just the data but dealt with the issues, re-imagining communities and powering an inclusive future. These issues were coupled with an understanding that revitalizing communities requires connectivity that enhances accessibility which in turn opens up opportunity and can lead to recovery, less carbon, and more resiliency. Additionally, the session highlights how digital advancements can produce workforce opportunity.

While digital transformation and supporting agendas and priorities, are the goal, governments will need to make sure that communities are protected. Cassie Roach, VP Global Public Sector for Cisco, underscored some of the most important of these challenges by clearly raising the substantial issues of data security and personal privacy. Other panelists from Cisco, Hendrik Blokhuis (Director Global Sector for Europe – Middle East, Africa, Russia and Lara Fernandes referenced the role of public private partnerships and in particular called attention to Cisco’s Digital Acceleration program.

My work at Harvard’s Kennedy School involves bringing together city officials interested in digital innovation. These public leaders need private partners, but these partnerships will not succeed if not constructed well. And getting the arrangement and terms right requires that government is advised well enough to allow it to pull the best of the private sector but within rules and priorities set by the public sector

The session also raised the need to connect technical advancements with work force. Having authored a book due out in February on how to build better systems that will upskill more workers into living wage jobs, INSERT LINK we were pleased to hear the keynoters also call attention to digital skills investment. They referenced in particular the work in Spain on education programs, including one with the Manpower Group training 3000 + students through upscaling and rescaling.

We truly are at an inflection point—in terms of crisis and opportunity. Solving problems associated with covid, climate and equity require imagining innovative solutions facilitated by connectivity but powered by partnerships motivated by producing public value. Transforming communities in the face of unprecedented change requires agility and accelerated action to transition cities into the future. Such transformation is within our grasp so long as its within our imagination.